Archive for June, 2012

I’m not a great one for family history and I find it hard to remember who some of my cousins are, but my sister has traced the family back quite some time. It gets tricky in Wales, as my grandmother – the only grandparent who I remember – was a Davies, and both her parents had been Davies too. Perhaps slightly easier than if they had been Jones or Evans, though I’m not sure. But anyway I have Welsh blood – and still have cousins and other relatives there, though it’s a while since the last funeral where I met any of them – and grew up not entirely sure whether I should be supporting Wales or England in the Rugby; fortunately my brief flowering as a powerful wing-forward came to an end at 13 or 14, when I stopped growing and the rest of the cohort shot up past me and I could no longer flatten scrum halves so effectively, getting banished to the wing and oblivion, saving me from the difficult choice of which nation to favour with my services.

Evans Bros, Cymu – Wales

But Wales, rural mid-Wales, did have some importance in my upbringing, our family going to stay at with my aunt and uncle, a water bailiff (or poacher) on the River Wye, for a couple of weeks several years as a cheap Summer holiday. Times were hard for ordinary people then, and unless like us you had relatives in the country most people we knew stayed at home even if they could afford a week or two off work – or had no option but to stop when the factory closed down. In Wales we could roam wild on the hillsides, lie down beside pools in the local stream, an arm hanging in the water and watch the fish swimming above our playing fingers, fight or play with the village children, going back home only when dinner or tea called. There I discovered the joys of the earth closet and got so fed up with eating freshly caught fish that it was around 40 years before I started liking it again.

Cwmaman

I went back to Wales a couple of times as a young teenager, camping with the Boy Scouts as we were then. In Monmouth I drew and discovered watercolour painting, neither the most scout-like of activities, and in Built Wells had my first, highly unsatisfactory and entirely unconsummated encounter with the opposite sex with a young lady who obviously knew far more about it than me – which wasn’t hard – but managed to teach me very little. More successfully we built a bridge for the farmer across the River Irfon and I have a group photograph somewhere with me and the ‘real’ Dan Archer who came to our camp-fire. The Irfon is a pretty substantial tributary of the Wye, and I passed my 50 metre swimming test in it, though it was tough to get anywhere against the stream.

It was easier to photograph children in the 1980s

We were of course rather further south in our trip to the valleys, and in an area with quite a different atmosphere, where much of the grass was still darkened by coal dust and grime, despite the closure of the collieries. This second set of pictures is mainly or entirely from Cwmaman and I think were taken on a wet Sunday morning.

Cwmaman

I’ll post at least one more set of these pictures from the valleys, and perhaps will put a larger selection on line as a web site. I may also have taken some colour, though I only remember some of the black and white images.

Nikon, forced by the Tokyo District Court to honour its agreement with photographer Ahn Sehong to show his exhibition of ‘Comfort Women‘ after it had bowed to right wing pressure to cancel it (see my post Nikon Bows To Extreme Right), have further antagonised opinion around the world by their actions at the gallery.

Visitors to the show had to undergo searches by Nikon hired security staff, including the use of metal detectors, and Nikon tried to prevent any media coverage and attempted to prohibit photography inside the show, although such bans are now virtually impossible to enforce. Their actions have been both misguided and counter-productive.

Right-wing extremists who deny the Japanese atrocities of the Second World War including the abduction and abuse of the ‘Comfort Women’ have protested outside the gallery, and some heightened security at the gallery is necessary to prevent any attacks by these groups on the show. But the Nikon gallery are clearly trying still to censor the show and public debate about it, as well as making it difficult and unpleasant for visitors to attend. Fortunately this does not appear to have had the intended effect, and Global Voices report Sehong as saying that many people came to the show on the first day and “many Japanese people showed condolences to these old ladies.”

Photographers from around the world have also showed their support for Sehong and their anger towards Nikon, with some calling for a boycott of Nikon products. The I Am Censored web site mentioned in my post Letter to Nikon is still calling for signatures – please sign if you have not already done so.

Calls to boycott Nikon are hardly practicable for those of us who are Nikon users, and have no meaning for the other half or more of professional photographers who use Canon. But I think we all have an interest in opposing this threat to free speech and photographic integrity, and need to find effective ways of making our views known to Nikon – wherever, whenever and however we can.

I hope everyone enjoyed the presentations – they did seem to be well-received, and there were some interesting questions afterwards. One that I passed on, and regretted my chickening out afterwards was about the sheer volume of images currently being made (and uploaded to the web) and whether this was damaging to photography. Chris picked this up and gave a decent answer, and I sat there thinking it was a question I could write a book about but would find it difficult to say much coherent in a couple of minutes. Of course it is something that I’ve mentioned at times on this blog, and I should have at least have had a try.

Photography, as I think our four contributions had made clear means very different things to different people, a medium that can be made use of in many different ways. Perhaps one might ask a similar question about writing. There is an enormous written output publicly visible now, in blogs, on Twitter, Facebook etc, on web sites etc that simply didn’t exist a few years ago – when if most people wrote it was in letters to friends or personal diaries or shopping lists. Much of the writing now on the web is mundane, much trivial, some illiterate. Much is technical or instructional. Our shopping lists may be very useful to us, but when people blog them I don’t have a great deal of interest. But does all this mean that there are fewer – or more – good short stories or great novels? Probably not, though it may be harder to locate them in the larger pile of dross. Perhaps like gold where you need to dig a ton of ore for a gram or less of metal, though with less of the damage and strife that mining causes. (My report on last week’s ‘Carnival of Dirt’ is coming shortly on My London Diary!)

I’ve been fortunate to know one or two truly great photographers and to meet several more, but they are really very thin on the ground. Perhaps the one I knew best was arguably one of the greatest British photographers of the last century, but unless you are a photographer you will not have heard of Raymond Moore. Come to that, relatively few people could name any great British novelists or serious writers of the last 50 years, though I’ve mentioned at least one contender on these pages before. We probably have a good idea of what would be meant by ‘Dickensian‘ or even ‘Joycean‘ but I think the only recent coinage that has joined these is ‘Ballardian‘.

In 1984, within a day or two of the announcement by the National Coal Board of the closure of more than 20 pits that led to the Miners’ Strike, I went with three other photographers to photograph in the Welsh valleys. They had already suffered from the closure of pits and steelworks, vastly accelerated by the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, who the previous year had appointed the former British Steel boss Ian McGregor to do a similar hatchet job on the miners.

I intended to return and made a few half-hearted attempts to get some funding for a more extensive project, but the money that was available went to better-known photographers, and after a while I more or less forgot about these pictures, only coming across them now, when I’m going systematically through all of my old (and decaying) negatives, producing high-res scans of those I find of interest.

This is a long, hard slog, though not without moments of interest – and the pictures from Wales provided some of this recently. I started the process some years ago, soon after I first bought a film scanner although some of the early scans might not be too good, as scanners (my first was a real dog) and my scanning techniques have improved over time. But I came back to the job seriously around the start of 2012, scanning pictures I took in 1978, and I’m now up to May 1984, so I’m making some progress, though at the moment I’m only scanning images and have only retouched the few that I want to actually publish – like these – and even then only removing the major problems that would show on a small image. Fully retouching some of these can take an hour of tedious work.

I’m trying hard to be selective, although there are quite a few from that period that are of more interest to my own family than a wider audience, as my two sons were both young at the time. Though I think some of my family pictures are of wider interest, and my first web site, initially put on line at the end of 1995, though I re-scanned the images a few months later and rewrote the html in 2003, still gets some interest – Family Pictures.

I think I took notes in Wales about where the pictures were taken, but all I’ve found so far are the brief names of places (sometimes wrongly spelt) on the contact sheets. We stayed at a small guest house in Merthyr Tydfil and the first contact sheet says ‘Cefn Coed, Dowlais’ as well as telling me some technical details, though I don’t think you need to know that they were taken with an Olympus OM2 on Agfapan 100, developed in Rodinal 1+60 for 8 minutes.

Cefn Coed-y-Cymmer is noted for its viaduct – now a footpath as trains ceased to run in the 1960s. When I stayed with my aunt and uncle in mid-Wales as a child we sometimes travelled up through the valleys on several changes of train to reach them, and I almost certainly went over it, though the line now ends at Merthyr. Most of the rest of the pictures in this post are I think from Dowlais, which at one time had the largest iron works in the world.

Of course, Wales was full of chapels, with almost every minute doctrinal disagreement leading to worshippers walking out and setting up a new one down the road. I think my forebears were responsible for several, though not this one. Built in 1838, Rebuilt in 1861 it states, but by 1984 it was derelict. It is still just visible on Google ‘Street View’ , on the corner of an alley leading to Old Church St,almost hidden behind bushes and shrubs that have grown in front of it.

Ebenezer Independent Chapel, Pontycapel Road, Cefn Coed-y-Cymmer

These pictures were a few of those from the first couple of films, and altogether there are perhaps around 50 that I thought I should scan of the roughly 250 black and white exposures. Back in those days I couldn’t afford to take a great deal of film, though there are one or two motifs that I struggled with for 10-15 frames, but mostly I was satisfied with one or two exposures. Generally it is the more straight-forward images rather than those where I was trying to be clever and arty that interest me more now. Probably one day when I have a few hours to spare I’ll put up a web site with these pictures from the valleys.

The ‘Carnival of Dirt‘ was an event to point out the environmental damage, destruction of habitat, human rights abuses, deaths and wars around the world caused by the activities of mining companies, many of which are based in London. Much of their activities are financed by the major London financial institutions – the big UK banks, the Stock Exchange, our pension funds and the rest of the City.

One particular London institution, the London Metal Exchange prides itself on being “the world’s premier non-ferrous metals market and offering “futures and options contracts for aluminium, copper, tin, nickel, zinc, lead, aluminium alloy and NASAAC, steel billet, cobalt and molybdenum” and on “setting the global standard.”

10.5mm, corrected to cylindrical perspective

It’s a industry whose standards have corrupted governments around the world, killed millions in countries such as the Congo, and gambles with the future of the planet. Among the chief villains are Xstrata, Glencore International, Rio Tinto, Vedanta, Anglo American, BHP Billiton, BP and Shell.

10.5mm, corrected to cylindrical perspective

Given that the problems caused by mining are truly global, the opposition to them needs to be global too, and as well as various UK based groups including UK Uncut (the mining companies massively organise to avoid tax) and Occupy, the Carnival brought together groups campaigning about the Congo, West Papua, the Philippines, Somalia, Latin America, Australia and the Canadian Tar Sands.

The morning’s event that I photographed was a funeral procession to honour the many who have been killed, with the Government of the Dead having some previous experience at such events. But it was a funeral with a New Orleans style carnival atmosphere and a rather good marching band playing.

Planned for a Friday in the middle of June we might have hoped for summer weather, but the day was cool with rather frequent showers, and I had considerable problems with the rain. Sometimes I do wish I had an underwater camera, although on this occasion as often there were more problems with the lenses than the cameras.

Given the price and amateur nature of the Nikon 18-105 mm I can hardly complain that it isn’t a good lens in wet weather. It’s a lens that almost doubles its length on zooming, pumping damp air in and out. Combine that with the temperature drops in heavy showers and the solar heating in the sunny intervals and it is never long before condensation begins to form on the internal lens elements and images degrade to unusable blurs.

Most of the time I would in any case be working with the 16-35mm on an event like this where its normally possible (and often essential) to work inside the group of protesters. And the Nikon f4 lens is large, well-sealed and entirely professional. Both zoom and focus take place by moving internal elements. But after a couple of hours working, this too, rather to my surprise, started steaming up and also became more or less unusable.

10.5mm

For around half an hour, the only usable lens in my kit was the 10.5 mm fisheye, and although it is one of my favourite lenses I have to admit it is hardly a general purpose optic. Fortunately there was plenty I could do with it, though I did curse a little later at the extra work it gave me in post-processing, where I needed to convert most of the images from the full-frame fisheye to cylindrical perspective. Later the 16-35 had more or less cleared and I was able to take a few images with that, though some show a little blurring.

10.5mm, corrected to cylindrical perspective

Fortunately by this time the rain had almost stopped, as the exposed front element of the fisheye is great at collecting raindrops and just can’t be protected at all, just wiped immediately before each exposure. Even doing this you lose a few pictures from drops that land between wipe and shutter press.

10.5mm, corrected to cylindrical perspective

On the train home I took a more careful look at the 16-35mm, still steamed up, and decided that the problem – or at least most of it – was not in the lens itself but on the rear surface of the filter screwed onto its front. Water must have got in between the glass and the metal body of the filter and at some point condensed there. Had I realised earlier I might have been able to keep working simply by unscrewing the filter and wiping the front element and rear of the filter dry before replacing it – or even working without a filter for a while, though I don’t like doing so.

All the images here were taken with the 10.5mm except for the top image, made with the 16-35mm. Of the 10.5mm images, all except one here were corrected to cylindrical perspective in post-processing.

1984 for me always brings to mind George Orwell, but if you are a Sikh it has a different meaning, the year when the Golden Temple was stormed by Indian troops and when so many Sikhs were killed there and in the massacres carried out by Hindu extremists and apparently encouraged by the Indian authorities, particularly after the killing by her Sikh bodyguards of Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi, in which many thousands of Sikhs were killed.

The object of the assault on the temple complex was to clear out Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his supporters who were alleged by the Indian government to be terrorists and storing arms there. He led a movement calling for the return of Sikhs to their traditional practices and against Article 25 of the Indian constitution which declared the Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists to be part of the Hindu. He wanted a clear and distinct identity for the Sikh nation. Since his killing and the other events of 1984 many Sikhs have argued this can only be achieved by the formation of a Sikh state, Khalistan.

Few of the speeches were in English, though there were a few short bilingual contributions, and without knowing some of the background many of the placards would be hard to understand, and the event difficult to photograph intelligently.

One face on many of the placards was that of Balwant Singh Rajoana, involved in the 1995 plot which killed Beant Singh, Chief Minister of the Punjab who had ordered ruthless suppression of Sikh separatists and was allegedly responsible for the extra-judicial killing of many thousands of Sikhs. Sentenced to death in 2007, his execution fixed for 31 March 2012 was postponed following an appeal for clemency.

Placards and the messages on them are vital in photographing protests, and it’s sometimes easy to get things wrong. In this picture

I’ve framed the foreground placard so that it appears to say ‘Forget 84’, while of course the opposite was actually intended, as the image below makes clear.

Of course the real message of the upper image could be made clear in a caption, but captions and images are often separated. It’s best to make it clear in the image.

It was quite by coincidence that I returned to London from my holiday in Devon with friends the afternoon before the London World Naked Bike Ride was taking place. But it did give me something to look forward too on my return to work.

There is something rather entertaining about the sight of hundreds of naked or near naked people on bikes going past the sights of London, and it certainly entertains the thousands of tourists who stop to gaze at them in astonished and bewildered delight. Of course there are a few people who are upset and perhaps offended or feel somehow threatened by this display of public nudity, though I might be more impressed if more of them turned their faces away rather than continuing to witness the sinful activity.

Of course it is a rather unusual event, with people taking part for various reasons, including simply having a little fun as well as those with a strong commitment to environmental issues and others more concerned with naturism (and of course these are in no way exclusive.) But as I’ve commented before, there isn’t a clear message coming across. One of the things I try and do in photographing the event is to concentrate on those riders with messages on their bodies and the few placards or flags.

There are always considerably more men than women taking part, and for various reasons most people taking pictures who are mostly men concentrate on the less covered up women riders. At the start where crowds gather it often got hard to take photographs of the women as there were too many others trying to do so – and pushing in front of others to do so. The crowds made it very difficult to start the event, and those of us who tried to move back when requested by the stewards or police simply found that we were at the back of a crowd.

This year the problems at the start were particularly bad because there was time for the crowd to build up in a relatively small area, and the start took place into a busy roundabout with traffic flowing normally around it, creating dangerous conditions for the cyclists. Why on earth didn’t the police stop the traffic for a few minutes to allow a safer start? It would have also have got the event started in a fraction of the time and caused far less traffic chaos.

Female nudity is generally more acceptable for publication than male, and of course ‘topless’ images are a staple of parts of the popular daily press. Photographing men is I think trickier, and for many publications full frontal images present a problem. Although it doesn’t worry me, I do try to make sure that at least in some images for publication there are carefully positioned handlebars or flags or legs etc which make the images more widely publishable.

Most of the rides I’ve photographed in the several years I’ve covered this annual event there have been people that I’ve known taking part, and they have been among the keenest to see my pictures, which have also been commented on favourably by some of those concerned with organising the event.

Almost all of the pictures were taken with the D700, as I still haven’t repaired or replaced the D300 with the mirror that keeps sticking. Although a few – including the top one here – were with the 16-35mm Nikon, I soon changed to the Sigma 28-300 for the remainder of the event. It isn’t a lens I like much; it could be sharper (particularly at the long end) and focus sometimes seems just a little slow, but is considerably smaller, lighter and cheaper than the Nikon alternative, and it did the job adequately. The Nikon 28-300mm isn’t one of their better performers in any case, and such superzoom lenses are always a compromise.

The 18-105mm Nikkor would possibly have been a better choice (equivalent to 27-155mm) but used on the FX body the files it gives are only 2784×1848 px, around 5Mp compared to the normal FX size of 4256×2832 px. I’d need to get Lightroom to upsize them a little before filing, but I suspect the quality would be superior even so, as this lens is a much better performer despite being so cheap. I also very much like being able to see outside the red framing rectangle in the viewfinder, rather like you can on a rangefinder camera, which makes covering action so much easier. Exactly why I’m considering buying a D800 (or more likely the 800E) mainly to use as a DX camera.

Don’t visit Naked Cyclists Ride Against Oil on My London Diary if nudity will offend you. Otherwise I hope you enjoy it. For some reason the pages on the World Naked Bike Ride usually seem to be among the most popular on the site!

I have to admit that we shop at Sainsbury’s though I can’t remember when I last actually went there. But the stuff we eat that you can’t buy from Tradecraft (my wife sells their stuff on a weekly stall), our superb local butcher (just a shame the fishmonger was forced out of business by our local council) and the local market and a few little things from Waitrose (Sainsbury’s doesn’t have a decent mature cheddar) we get the rest mainly from Sainsbury’s mainly because it is the most convenient local supermarket – ten minutes away on a bike, and Linda fills her panniers there once a week. Though they won’t get that rich on the little we spend.

So I was just a little disturbed to find myself photographing a protest outside a Sainsbury’s Localjust off Holborn Circus as the launch event of a new national campaign, Pay Up!, aimed at making poverty a political issue. Before I’ve photographed protests at Tescos, at Marks and Spencer’s and even at Waitrose, but this was a first for Sainsbury’s.

But it turns out that they are a low pay employer, actually paying 50p and hour less to its lowest paid staff than Tesco, and certainly not enough to live on in London.

I reached the store with the leading protesters, and wondered whether to follow them in. The police weren’t far behind and I decided to stop and photograph them blocking the entrance to the mass of the protesters instead.

– weren’t great, but probably more interesting than what was happening inside, and I was able to go along the the exit and photograph the half a dozen or so who had got inside as they were fairly politely ushered out by the shop staff and police.

Of course I had to make sure that at least some of the pictures explained what the protest was about, and the banner outside the shop was an easy way to show this, with its use of their advertising slogan ‘Try Something New Today?’ and the protesters’ suggestion ‘Pay A Living Wage.’ You’ll see on My London Diary that I took a few more pictures making use of these slogans.

After a while when the protest moved around the corner to the Sainsbury’s offices on Holborn Circus I got another of my favourite images from the day, although this time the banner was held with its message away from me. It was certainly better to work from the side with the bodies of the people holding it visible, and the text would have perhaps taken something from the visual impact of the image.

The lighting was quite tricky during the protest, with low evening sun and some areas in pretty deep gloom. Much of the time the fill from the SB800 was needed and did a good job, but there were just a couple of pictures where something went wrong. Here’s one of them, with perhaps a couple of stops more flash than I wanted (I had it set for -2/3 stop.)

It needed a little flash (I took a couple of frames without) but this was way too much, and the fingers of that hand close to the lens were completely burnt out. Even with a lot of work in Lightroom I couldn’t quite rescue the image. Of course I am too close to her – the minimum distance shown on the back of the flash is I think 1.2metres, and had I been thinking I would have tried to cut down the flash in some way, but there wasn’t time to do much. I did see the problem and tried to take a couple of images with the flash off, but it did need some extra light.

1.2 metres (at ISO 1600) does seem rather a long way and the minimum distance increases as you put up the ISO. It’s something that makes flash a lot harder for me to use in low light where I want high ISO to avoid excessively dark backgrounds. Perhaps Nikon could improve the flash circuitry in some way to make life easier?

Protests sometimes involve an element of secrecy with their locations being kept secret until the last minute, or being restricted to perhaps a single photographer who is invited to cover them. I’ve had quite a few such invitations, but mostly these have been for events early in the morning so that pictures can reach the newspapers by around 11am, when many of the stories for the next day’s paper – apart from really important breaking news – are finalised.

Living as I do on the fringe of London, covering early morning events in London means getting up very early and paying extortionate fares to travel in. It’s too expensive to do often on spec as a freelance, and actual commissions are rare, so mainly I cover events later in the day.

On Saturday there are cheaper fares all day, and in any case the Great British Street Party at a mystery location organised by UK Uncut and DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) was starting from 4 locations in London at the very reasonable time of 11am, and I didn’t even need to rush my breakfast.

The protest started at Waterloo (and 3 other locations)

Although I couldn’t have know it, I could have enjoyed another hour in bed, because it turned out that Waterloo station was the gathering point on which people from the other three locations would converge, while those of us who had started there were simply waiting for them.

An Anonymous protester on the train to Putney

I think the four groups all finally arrived and we made our way on a train going back in the same direction I had come into Waterloo. As the train pulled into Putney (which I had gone through almost two hours earlier – and I could have saved half my fare) two of the four blocks got the order to alight, while the other two were told to stay on the train.

Should I get off or stay on? Most of the photographers I could see were getting off, so I decided to stay on, hoping to get some different and perhaps better pictures. I still am not sure if it was the better choice and from the pictures I’ve seen both groups actually missed perhaps the most interesting part of the protest as it began in the short street where Deputy PM Nick Clegg lives – though he and his family were known to be away for the weekend.

Had I known in advance where we were going I would have chosen Putney, and then made sure I was on the spot when things started. But had the organisers told me and the other photographers, then the police too would have probably got to know and prevented the protesters reaching there.

According to the press release after the event, the street was secured at both ends by protesters in wheelchairs chaining themselves across it, but by the time I arrived, the police were holding back the other group of protesters at the far end of the street and at our end there was just one person in a wheelchair and a small handful of people holding a banner waiting for us. If the wheelchair users did chain themselves across the road I don’t think the press got there in time to take photos.

A few yards up the road were half a dozen police who stopped us as we walked up the road, but not for long. When a couple of protesters tried to push through the police turned to grab them and the rest of us simply ran (or walked, as I did) past their line.And I think we walked straight past Nick Clegg’s house because nobody knew where the party was meant to be, rushing up to join the other half of the protest.

For a while the police too seemed to have no idea what to do, and the party-goers found themselves in the middle of two disorganised groups of officers, one trying to push them one way and the second pushing them back. Eventually they got themselves sorted out and formed a line several officers deep blocking off the northern part of the road we had come down – and which presumably included the Deputy PM’s house.

This left a nice space on the road for the party to take place, and there was truly a party atmosphere, with live music and free food. Some of the press talked about the neighbours being frightened and harassed but there was no cause for it and they would have been welcomed had they come and joined in.

I left early but the party continued for another four or five hours before those remaining left together for Putney station. On there way they were attacked by police, presumably frustrated by standing around doing nothing very much all through a hot Saturday afternoon. It was probably the only time in the day that anyone in Putney should have been much disturbed by what was going on.